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Let’s go back and look at the priceless historical value of what is being quietly taken away. Then I will show more of the ways this stealth robbery is occurring through K-12 education. How it both hides under legal mandates most are unaware of and in known initiatives that have unappreciated aspects. You know how I explain in my book and on this blog that Radical Ed Reform is like a giant jigsaw puzzle where the pieces fit so the gears can then engage as designed? Turns out that aspect has a name no one bothered to tell us about. “Plug-and-Play” is the new phrase I stumbled across. We may be the players on the proverbial chessboard of this game we are funding, but no one intends to let us plan our own moves anymore.

The book Property and Freedom: The Story of How Through the Centuries Private Ownership has Promoted Liberty and the Rule of Law reminds us that when governments at all levels decide to “seek not just freedom but opportunity…not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result,” those aims of social equality require actual coercion. Lack of consent is not an option. Professor Pipes, after quoting President Johnson, points out that “once the elimination of poverty becomes a state objective, the state is bound to treat property not as a fundamental right, which it is its supreme obligation to protect, but [my emphasis] as an obstacle to social justice.”

What I want to add is if that is true of physical things, property in the form of personal knowledge, values, attributes, and beliefs is even more at risk as an obstacle. Those personal characteristics of each of us, so targeted now through a Whole Child social and emotional learning emphasis, are precisely what can recognize the loss of what is being taken away. Those are the qualities that allow an individual to stand before a stampeding herd and try to turn it in time. Those are also forms of personal property in the sense recognized by Pipes when he wrote:

“The right to property in and of itself does not guarantee civil rights and liberties. But historically speaking, it has been the single most effective device for ensuring both, because it creates an autonomous sphere, in which by mutual consent, neither the state or society can encroach; by drawing a line between the public and the private, it makes the owner co-sovereign, as it were.”

Since I am neither “oblivious to the consequences” of what these reforms in K-12 education are actually intended to transform, nor as yet unable to “even speak my mind” on the effects of “subordinating individual rights to group rights,” here are some specifics that abrogate any inkling of that personal sovereignty. If you took your solace from the vision of the last post from a belief that that particular view of the future would not happen, I am guessing KnowledgeWorks failed to send you a copy of the blueprint it created for remaking the traditional high school. Let me fix that omission. http://www.knowledgeworks.org/sites/default/files/High%20School%20Race%20to%20the%20Top.pdf

Does anyone have a personally autonomous sphere when governments decide to partner with the “local workforce system” to prescribe what students are now to know and be able to do? All students are to achieve the stipulated “competencies and learning objectives.” If that sounds innocent enough, with only some overtones of social engineering, how about a requirement that the “knowledge and skills” be suitable for being “applied to complex situations regardless of content area.” That’s sounding quite preprogrammed isn’t it? How about learning objectives that “provide the specific tasks a student must complete to demonstrate proficiency.” Should governments be dictating that the “days of direct instruction are numbered,” while stipulating a requirement for “engaged learning that ignites students’ intrinsic motivation”?

That will require a great deal of personal probing, won’t it? Hard to respect the integrity of the person though in a blueprint that actually has an Element 3 calling for “public-private partnerships” with community organizations and businesses. Whose needs will be met in creating “customized learning pathways for all students”? Pathways for those of us who avoid the woods at all costs and hate looking at maps basically decide where we may tread without being arrested or maybe stepping on a snake. Whose interests are determining these Pathways and how do students get to move beyond the stipulated “essential skills such as collaboration, initiative, global awareness, creativity, critical thinking, and perseverance”?

The federal government’s partner in many of these workforce readiness visions for K-12 education is an entity called Jobs for the Future. They have created an initiative that is also probably off your radar called Students at the Center. It guides the actual classroom implementation while staying hidden to the typical parent, school board member, or taxpayer. An excellent strategy for getting your way without messy controversy. Tracking through those footnotes though pulled up this vision of education in 2020 where education globally now expects less disabling curricula than the historic emphasis on print. http://aim.cast.org/w/resources/indira/text/2020LearningLandscape.pdf;jsessionid=2418E9C0A6ADC89C46B5764CE1F45E0D

Yes, you did read that right since apparently we belong to the last generation that need worry about reading instead of “multimedia experiences” we are immersed in. A print emphasis in school is to be seen as a matter of injustice. Since I covered why print is so liberating to the human mind in Chapter 2: “The Danger of the Fluent Reader”, I will simply refer blog readers there. Please also note that this vision where by 2020, “the basic platform for education is no longer print media” is being pushed by the same group that forced the pernicious Universal Design For Learning into the Common Core in the first place (see Chapter 7 on that). The repeated insistence now in education globally to proclaim the Death of the Gutenberg Era is nothing more than an attempt to constrain the independence of the human mind when it can access books and other information without restraint.

Has anyone noticed an accelerating push around IB programs? Did you know that when people like Linda Darling-Hammond describe their dream type of assessment for the future IB is the one they point to? Did you know IB has revised its required Theory of Knowledge course for its Diploma Programme? It has already been rolled out with the first schedules assessment in 2015.The IBO Guidelines added religion as a New Area of Knowledge since Religious Knowledge Systems have “a major impact on how they understand the world, permeating their thinking and influencing their understanding of other AOKs ..for many, religion provides a backdrop to all the other knowledge they have.”

I do believe that new found reverence for religious belief only extends to certain beliefs since the New TOK officially wants to cross out the following:

* Unsustainable absolutist conception of knowledge

*Black and white thinking: no perspectives (objectivism) or just perspectives (subjectivism)

*Egocentric, “I the knower” approach

* Naked, monolithic, quantitative Ways of Knowing

That last one certainly explains all the fascination for non-linear problem-solving based on instinct instead of logic or known algorithms. As I explained in Chapter 4 of my book “The Danger of the Analytical Thinker”, none of these ‘reforms’ is really about a better way to teach a subject. It’s always a means to change the student at a psychological level. It also tries to train the student in a reverence for the collective and shared knowledge instead of personal knowledge.

Speaking of cronyistic public-private partnerships and a shared knowledge push, others have pointed out that on November 17, 2004 Bill Gates personally signed a Cooperation Agreement between UNESCO and Microsoft. My chief concern was laid out in Appendix 3 on creating “communities of practice” and students becoming merely “a participant of a community,” instead of the autonomous individuals they have historically been in the Western tradition of the always related individualism, property, and freedom. Requiring “shared practice” in education and the classroom is not free. Neither is having UNESCO or Microsoft or Mr Gates developing a required “perspective on knowing and learning that informs efforts to create learning systems in various sectors and at various levels of scale, from local communities, to single organizations, partnerships, cities, regions, and the entire world.”

Well, that’s an ambitious vision of shared knowledge. Rather authoritarian too. Will you or your children adapt well to a sense of ’empowerment’ no longer coming from what you can do on your own or who you choose to work with? Instead, CoPs “facilitate ’empowerment’ through their members’ ability to participate in a community and allow the participants to drive the community.” There’s apparently no scheduled Opt Out if we simply want to escape being a required participant in the community or a ‘mere’ member of society.

Come on Robin, you say, quit sounding like you’d prefer the option of being a hermit. Well, OK, let’s look quickly at what the cited creator of these CoPs has in mind in education. No need to speculate http://wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/09-10-27-CoPs-and-systems-v2.01.pdf Wenger wants to see the student as a “social participant, as a meaning-making entity for whom the social world is a resource for constituting an identity.”

Oh. Good. Grief. First Prescribed Pathways and now Preformed Molds for fostering a Desired Identity in order to “organize our participation.”

If we think of the Common Core as a bucket or a banner instead of pretending it is about the transmission of knowledge, its function becomes much clearer. All the changes that would cause an outcry if pursued separately, and in many cases already have created widespread popular rejection, get to Come on Down Anyway as the game show announcer would say. A science fiction geek might explain the Common Core as a cloaking device allowing controversial shifts to be put into place without exposure. Especially if the new materials are all “web-based” and just waiting to be downloaded.

Now before I start raising anyone’s blood pressure by describing the ABF’s intentions, let’s go Down Under to a K-12 pilot Global Change Agent Michael Fullan was involved in about a decade ago. It was called the Dynamic Paradigm of Learning and Change and it “identifies key aspects of the need, nature, and means of changes in identity, dispositions and orientations to the world and others, to be required of educators [that’s the real reason why tenure is being taken away or greatly restricted now in the US], in order for them to be able to assist young people [that would be the children we entrust to adults and pay vast sums to actually know something] to achieve similar transformational outcomes.” Got that? Psychological changes. Shifts in values, attitudes, and how the world and other people are now to be perceived.

Education Queensland came right out and phrased the kind of Learning and Personal Change being sought in the individual student through K-12 education as a “new way of being” to be “required” of teachers and students. Remember Backward Mapping from our previous post? Well, Perspectives and the ABF offer “the opportunity to infuse CCSS implementation with social justice values.” How? Well, remember Literacy is now to be taught Across the Curriculum and the ABF has 4 domains: Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action. Does that sound alarmingly similar to “identity, dispositions and orientations to the world and others” to anyone else?

The “rich text” available for download highlights and fosters the “exploration of identity, authentic accounts of real-life experiences, intergroup understanding, historical empathy, the awareness of prejudice and injustice, individual and collective struggles against injustice and–finally-action against injustice.” They do mean that latter part about forcing action by the way as in “Students will plan and carry out collective action against bias and injustice in the world and will evaluate what strategies are effective.” Hey, you didn’t think ‘engaging’ classwork was just going to be about video gaming, did you?

And we can all be relieved that the Perspectives topics “will go beyond the more common issues of race and ethnicity to include wealth and poverty, disabilities, religious discrimination and immigration.” Plus, as an added bonus to make sure that the desired changes in consciousness do occur, Perspectives “encompasses…less covered, equally important themes like gender, sexual orientation and class.” It is supposedly the first “curriculum of its kind to offer an explicit blueprint designed to move students into the position of advocate.” Not to worry though. I can find no indication that the curriculum includes a Che Guevara beret kit or Mao’s Little Red Book as a Graphic Novel to hammer home that these are required orientations and dispositions.

Good to know then that the curriculum’s “marriage to the Common Core will allow it to be widely implemented.” The ‘backwards design’ approach of ABF and Perspectives does sound better than the List of Twenty Things Your Child Must Now Believe and Be Willing To Do, but it merely masks the nature of the sought change through the K-12 classroom. We can just imagine all the hateful things students will hear about the “dominant culture” and how they will just blossom as they are told repeatedly to “develop positive social identities based on their membership in multiple groups in society.” Students may not be able to identify precisely why the US pushed to separate from Britain and form a new country, but they will now learn to “recognize that power and privilege influence relationships on interpersonal, intergroup and institutional levels and consider how they have been affected by those dynamics.”

Feel the Outrage! is such a useful tool if transformative action is the End Game being sought. The outrage might be misplaced. It may be destructive, but those are mere details. I can just imagine how students who have been piloting this framework and thus getting to use the classroom over years to “identify figures, groups, events and a variety of strategies and philosophies relevant to the history of social justice around the world” would feel if a School Board then felt empowered to step in and tell them to remember the parts of American History that encourage patriotism. Walkout maybe? To commemorate what Gandhi would have done? Any other parent think they might slam the door in the face of a child “inspired to go home and talk to their parents about purchasing clothes from companies that practice ethical manufacturing”?

Of course that confrontation may be the first alert to the nature of the fundamental psychological changes going to the core of a child’s ‘being’ occurring in the classroom. By then it may well be hard to reverse, which is, I suspect, a big part of why the Common Core label makes such a fine cloaking device. “Web-based” means even the School Board may not know. I want to close with some related confessions that fit with the desired changes being sought that is probably not on your radar either. In 2004, a book by Seattle educator Barbara Ray Gilles called Nurturing Civilization Builders: Birthing the Best Schools in the World.

Gilles was kind enough to admit why we are hearing so much about collaboration as a necessity and the need for schools to create Communities of Learners with a single shared understanding after perspectives have been shared. She pointed out that “school classrooms encompass the largest community that young people experience.” If changes in “identity, orientations and dispositions” are sought, and globally that is in fact what the new purpose of K-12 education has quietly become, then the behavioral psychologists have come to recognize that the herd effect is needed. It both forces the change initially and then reenforces it over time.

Gilles again: “when you combine the individual wills of each person in a group focused on a unified goal, a ‘group will’ occurs that is greater than any individual. This collaboration is necessary to bring about a massive transformation in consciousness.” Gilles called the End Game she was backward mapping from Living Democracy. It fits with the vision of a New Kind of World we keep encountering as an End Game. Her motto of “Nurturing the compassionate genius within while co-creating a world that works for all” also fits with what SPLC claims is possible and the new goals of education change.

Gilles noted that “our values determine what we pay attention to, which in turn determine our behavior and create our habits.” That is true and there can be no question (going back to Milton Rokeach and his definition of Competency) that changing values is the fundamental purpose of all these planned classroom shifts.

The question becomes whether the World actually will change if this becomes the purpose of K-12 education globally or whether we are simply disarming our young people mentally and psychologically.

Will they be capable of dealing with the Evil and Bullies of the World?

With all our talk of honoring diversity and challenging oppression and injustice, aren’t we pushing an educational template that simply makes it easier to oppress and dominate most people?

Since I do not want to be accused of a Godwin’s Law violation, I will not tell precisely who uttered this sentiment that still lurks behind all of the current rhetoric of priming students to act for the Common Good. True idealism is nothing but subjecting the individual’s interests and life to the community. I will note though that when Governors and Mayors are now being instructed by multiple federal agencies to make workforce preparation the goal of K-12 and teachers and principals plan to target the Whole Child for monitoring and manipulation, everyone is thinking like a collectivist even if no one involved is really familiar with the crucial distinctions anymore. Luckily for us though, I have a copy of E. Merrill Root’s 1955 book Collectivism on the Campus so we can revisit these vital concepts during a previous heyday when people still recognized what was at risk.

Root goes back to people like the famous 19th century poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and reminds us that this struggle with the coercive potential of the State has a long history:

“collectivism would reduce unique persons to efficient functions of a dominant mass; and individualism, that would exalt the status of the persons who freely constitute it… By nature, individualism sees society as the means and the individual as the end. Man does not exist to serve society, as among the bees and the ants; society exists to serve unique, individual persons…collectivism by its very nature and by its efficient practice regulates, prohibits, and compels.”

As we keep encountering the principle that democracy is suddenly to mean an ability by the majority in number to bind the minority to its wishes and perceived needs, which, I believe, is why this statistic has been getting so much recent hype http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/education/white-students-aren-t-going-be-majority-schools, let’s look at all the swirling intentions of fundamental transformations in so many areas by remembering: “all collectivisms, no matter how they differ in mood or means, are united in the socialist principle of control by the people collectively, or the state.”

Now let’s come forward a bit, but not yet all the way to the present. One of the contributors to The Great Adventure book from the last several posts was a creator of the 1970 document The Predicament of Mankind that sought to lay the seeds for using the theories of the social sciences and the research from the behavioral sciences to begin designing social systems in the West. It was to be the foundation of the Club of Rome. Now the CoR chose then instead, as the UN does now, to mask that actual intention in physical science models that understandably never work very well. They are an excuse to alter reality and existing human behaviors, not a means of reliably modelling what exists and predict what probably will be.

So Alexander N. Christakis, who we will now shorthand as Christo, resigned from the CoR and took his Structured Dialogue Design Process with him. It never went away though and it came to my attention in Chapter 6 of the book: “Technology to Liberate Rather Than Imprison Consciousness.” Now if that catches your attention as more and more ‘coursework’ to get ‘degrees’ or ‘workplace credentials’ shifts to online methods, it should. First though let’s see what Christo actually said were his intentions. He opens with this quote from fellow systems thinker and GERG social engineer Bela Banathy [see his tag on blog. We have met him before]. Remember what Dialogue means from the last post:

“Dialogue facilitates the development of a common language and collective mental models. Thus, the ability to engage in dialogue becomes one of the most fundamental and most needed human capabilities. Dialogue becomes a central component of any model of evolutionary transformation.”

The National Center for Dialogue and Deliberation that we just keep encountering http://ncdd.org/806 announced the giveaway of the SDD software to help encourage the dissemination of the participatory democracy model. Remember the one that lies at the heart of how urban metro areas are to operate politically in the future? The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act and sector strategies and Career Pathways with Big Business are such drivers towards a reality of collectivism precisely because they intersect with these declared goals of Metropolitanism and the determination of so many mayors that they are the place for achieving Economic Justice.

Now added to that we get Christo declaring in a 2012 Training Workshop on Why and How We Ought to Reinvent Democracy that SDD is the means “for building capacity internationally for addressing highly complex problems using the science of dialogue.” We also see in this 2012 published paper the intentions to use online coursework delivered internationally to allow broad interaction to reach common understandings of what are called Continuous Critical Problems. Dialogue via the Internet and the virtual realities it can deliver to create common experiences become a means for “Striving for Sustainable Global Democracy Through A Group Decision-Making Process: A Critical Review of an Online Course to Model Transformative Praxis.” http://www.sociostudies.org/journal/files/jogs/2012_1/135-151.pdf

From now on every time we hear the word Sustainable, we need to remember that article’s lead-in quote that “Sustainability is not simply about changing practices but more centrally about agreeing to change practices together.” Think of it as creating a mass perception of consensual collectivism via dialogue and deliberation. SDD trains participants, including K-12 students where it is much more likely to be called Guided Dialogue or the Discourse Classroom (unless we are in Finland where as we saw the required practice over years is a component now of what Global Citizenship is to come to mean). Think of how handy the rejection of facts, logic, lectures, and textbooks will be, as SDD uses ‘triggering questions’ (or what the related Understanding By Design or Backward Mapping call Essential Questions) to supposedly examine the roots and ‘deep drivers’ of messy, real world situations.

This allows the question to “frame the context of the dialogue” where “participants articulate their ideas in their own words to the full attention of the other participants.” Now one can see why a new affirmative Student Code of Conduct would be necessary as the clarifying and dialogue is to “authenticate each person irrespective of his or her education level or position of power.” No more ability to engage in that former educational pasttime at all levels of rolling eyes or otherwise indicating when something is clearly ignorant or absurd. It’s a perspective and disrespect, even if deserved to puncture the continued survival of patently BAD Ideas, would interfere with the desire to “build a sense of shared competence within the group.”

The better to build a sense of entitlement to collective decision-making and the use of something like that POWER Model Anthony Carnevale considered a New Workplace Basic 2 posts ago. Whether dealing with captive students in the classroom or adults on retreat or showing up for community input meetings, the idea consistently is to get “participants to rank the clusters of gathered observations according to their relative importance. This step brings into sharp relief the different priorities and values within the group. In the ensuing discussion, parties come to understand where their coparticipants are coming from, which leads to a respectful working relationship, based on defined mutual interest.”

Now common sense and a knowledge of history would reveal this method for “greatly enhanced decision-making and action-planning” is a global prescription for disaster. That would be why this reality of the ultimate goals is so shrouded in deceit and the need to make common sense and actual knowledge of history uncommon indeed. Since I am nothing if not a Deceit Shroud Buster and just drowning in what used to be called Horse Sense, lets end with what Christo said was intended. As you know, the purposes of the creators run with their techniques, theories, and practices, even when all those things are unknown to whomever is actually using or requiring their use.

SDD under its variety of names is a “method for gaining shared meaning, unified goals, and the systemic wisdom needed for effective conscious evolution…We mimic the webs of interdependence that exist in lively, livable communities and the buoyant activity these webs foster. We catalyze and nurture the qualities of Mutualism (or egalitarian give and take), Integration, Distributed Intelligence, Emotional Ties that Bind, Values and Wisdom (or the knowledge web).”

It seems silly, doesn’t it when the actual intentions are spelled out that way? That would be why such declarations are in books and reports we masses are not supposed to see. Discussed in conferences we may fund, but are not invited to.

Instead we get explanations for changes that may be plausible on their face, but never fit the facts. We get euphemisms like Quality Learning that are factually true but never accurately understood.

It is past time to remedy that. Maybe a shared understanding is a good thing when it is about the reality and methods for transformational cultural change.

Armed guards at a public hearing supposedly to look into, via committee, the federal role in education in Georgia. Ready to escort out and maybe arrest anyone who tried to interject accurate facts into a scripted effort to decree what the accepted beliefs could be. Interested citizens who recognized the misstatements, irrelevancies, material omissions, and conceded facts with behavioral programming implications, in what they were hearing and thus felt compelled to stand up and yell “Liars, Liars, Pants on Fire” would be met with all the power of the coercive state. Ready to dictate what its citizens must now accept as their knowledge and beliefs. Now, I was too busy taking voluminous notes to feel the need to comment. I was there after all because I wanted to know what particular falsehoods citizens were going to be urged to believe.

I have written up some of my insights and the implications for my book and this blog in two long comments to the previous post. Readers should take a look at those to fully grasp what was inadvertently conceded as the speakers desperately tried to obscure the feds bullying behavior with states back in 2009. I want to deal with the need for police power and this determined need to create false beliefs in adult citizens if they are paying attention and in virtually all students now as they move through what is now called the P-20 process. Education from preschool to graduate school is all now to be about being “more of a ‘value producing agency’ than an information-dispensing institution.”

What I grasped on Wednesday was that the state and local school administrators, with the help of certain of their elected political buddies, intended to implement Competency as Milton Rokeach first theorized about, and the WIOA and the GELP-Global Education Leaders Program (last post)’s Next Generation Learning, are now quietly pursuing. Searches since then have made it clear that while the excitement in the US is over the Common Core, Next Generation Learning is pursuing the actual behavioral programming intentions globally on parallel tracks mostly hidden from US taxpayers.

Now my kids will confirm that my tombstone should probably read “Never Lie to Her. She Always Immediately Knew and Went Looking for the Why.” The good news is that GELP and the US-centered CCSSO Innovative Learning Network (last post) have all confirmed literally that the actual description from documents I described in my book is still the intended trajectory. Unfortunately, they also confirm it is for the wholesale political, social, and economic transformations I also disturbingly lay out. With a touch of humor and irony as possible. Hooray for timely prescience!

What I want to do today is talk about the whys of the need for behavioral programming of students and coercing adults in their own beliefs. Why is competency-based learning so alarming to me? Before I get to what Milton Rokeach laid out in his federally-sponsored research in the 60s and 70s as the use of the term-Competency-to obscure what was to be values clarification, I want to remind everyone that the theorists for this Equity for All, Just Freedom, Human Rights as Economic Justice view of the future all concede that their vision will entail a coercive state. The armed enforcers the other day are simply a sign that public officials have decided to impose on us without consent or discussion what is known as the Flyvbjerg (no, I cannot pronounce it either but I have his book) Social Science Debate in Scandinavian countries.

The debate concerns the role of the social sciences in Western societies in the future. Since we Americans or Canadians or English or Australians might object to the planned shifts in society and the use of education to consummate the shift just as the Fabians imagined, we get lied to. If we recognize something is amiss and want to point it out in the prescribed public forum, we may be subject to arrest. We are not supposed to recognize the behavioral programming. Honestly, read this recent vision of the transformational purposes coming to a classroom and tell me its not about changing the child. http://www.edutopia.org/pdfs/blogs/edutopia-finley-9ways-plan-transformational-lessons.pdf

Flyvbjerg, who I will just call Flyv from now on (his advocacy though has now gained him an Oxford professorship), pointed out that “rationality may endanger sensitivity to context, experience, and intuition.” Keep that in mind when even the advocating district supers admit consistently the new classroom focus is to be on student ‘engagement’ and group activities. Neither of those builds up the rational mind in the sense the West, its prosperity, and the historic concept of the individual are all built around. Flyv wanted to make education in the West about discussing values, interests, and who has power. Remembering again that Charter District Fulton has announced remaking its high schools around ‘problem-based learning,’ Flyv viewed this power, interests, values emphasis as necessary if education is to produce adults ready “to think about what can be done to the problems and risks of our time.”

Since you probably do not have a copy of Making Social Science Matter, I will enlighten you that Flyv and the Competency advocates really are talking about education that now enshrines that “personal experience via trial-and-error is more important than context-independent, explicit, verbally formulated facts and rules.” That’s the real reason textbooks and lectures are going away and terms like assessment, ‘productive struggle’ and ‘rigor’ get substituted deceitfully to obscure this shift. Now Flyv conceded that this “experience-based behavior” substitution that gets hidden also now under terms like Excellence and Quality Learning instead of the historic “rule-based, rational mode of conceiving human activity” has so much destructive potential that the following exchange was proudly cited:

“Jurgen Habermas (a noted radical prof and modern Dewey advocate), after hearing Hubert Dreyfus present the model to him at Frankfurt University [exclaimed]: ‘you are talking about skills like hammering and chess, but what you really want to do is undermine Western society.’ To which Dreyfus replied, ‘you are right, that’s exactly what it comes to.”

Undermining Western society is a good reason to rely on a police presence to control what can be said, deceit by administrators well-paid for being willing to push this vision no matter what, and Orwellian definitions of terms. Now I first wrote about Rokeach here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/targeting-student-values-attitudes-and-beliefs-to-control-future-behavior/ . Competency IS a dangerous concept, as Rokeach used it, and our modern day global transformationalists are now using it. I went back to my copy of his 1979 Understanding Human Values: Individual and Social where he readily acknowledged that creating a “state of self-dissatisfaction” via “value confrontation” is the “basic psychological mechanism that generates such a sequence of enduring change.” The purpose of Competency in education now, whatever it means to the layman, has to do with “man’s power to alter experimentally another person’s basic values and control the direction of the change.”

Highly useful if the intentions of the 21st Century are to once again put political power thoroughly in charge of people and economies, which is precisely what open declarations of influential people admit is going on. I am going to end this post with another Rokeach quote that I believe tells us why the Finns developed what I am calling the Finnish Ladder Towards Consensus Collectivism and why US administrators are bringing it in as required systems thinking, Fostering Communities of Learners, Competency-based education, Discourse Classroom, or an affirmative Student Code of Conduct.

“I believe that a value education program will turn out to be illusory or self-deceptive if the sole focus is on the students’ own values…A more genuine self-awareness will, I believe, be achieved as a result of stimulating a comparison process, in which what we find out about ourselves is compared with what we find out about significant others. Experimental evidence…suggests that, in the process of making such comparisons between self and others, we will often become dissatisfied with what we have found out about ourselves, because it violates our conceptions of ourselves as competent and moral human beings. Such states of self-dissatisfaction are empirically found to lead to long-term change and, as a consequence, to long-term changes in related values, attitudes, and behavior.”

Just the view of education needed then for personal transformation as an unconscious reflex to foster broader fundamental social transformations. I am going to continue in the next post talking about the consistency in what is being sought.

We can now see why politicians, public employees, and private sector cronies all personally prospering from this unappreciated Statist vision would want a police presence to prevent someone like me from explaining with facts and documents what is really going on.

So I write. Aren’t you glad books and blogs remain an available avenue for a factual discussion?

Do you remember how the French thought the Maginot Line of bunkers and armaments would protect them from a future German invasion after World War I? So Hitler simply went around and came from another direction. The head of the same group whose ecstatic rejoicing over the passage of the WIOA in the US Senate tipped me off that something transformative was envisioned, announced in this video on “Rethinking Accountability” in education in June http://www.unfinishedbusiness.org/20140707-henderson-common-core-an-important-part-of-driving-equitable-change/ that ‘they’ were not going to let the US Constitution get in the way of achieving human rights for all as defined by the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That would be a human right to Just Economic Citizenship folks and an obligation for the rest of us to provide it.

Henderson does a shout-out to the 2 major US teachers unions, AFT and the NEA, and notes they are partners working on his Board as well as to his Vice-Chair, the General Counsel of maldef-the Mexican-American Legal Defense Education Fund. Legal amnesty and future citizenship for anyone who can make it to US soil is not a side issue. It is front and center of the Leadership Council’s (composed of 200 separate component groups) efforts to force the US towards Economic Justice and an Equitable Society and ‘building a More Ideal Union.’ Henderson points out that the “thousands of students who may not yet be citizens” need to be educated as if they were. You cannot watch that speech and especially the AFT President’s intro and not grasp that an invasion by migrants is viewed as a crucial means of fundamental transformation. It will radicalize education, the ballot box, and enable democratic local decision-making via participatory mandates of the relevant stakeholders in every community entitled to be consulted.

OK, you say, that’s a hugely troubling vision, but we still do not know precisely what the desired template is. But wait (no, this is not one of the Ronco commercials pushing Christmas presents no one really needs) one of the participating Consortium districts, Fulton County in Metro Atlanta (not coincidentally also involved in EdLeader 21, Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Schools, and with that new affirmative Student Code of Conduct) announced the vision in an article in a local paper. ‘Problem-based learning’ would be the new view of curriculum instead of icky textbooks. High School will become a place “for all learners…[where] students and teachers come together.” It is a place where ‘different types of learning styles are addressed’ that provides ‘collaborative learning opportunities.’ Lots of collaboration and chances to sing kumbaya in unison on a daily basis to build community spirit.

A bit of sarcasm there towards the end. I know perfectly well what is involved in Fostering a Community of Learners. That’s why FCL has its own tag on the blog connecting explanatory posts. Now, we could also pretend ‘problem-based learning’ is not in fact a euphemism for what radical Paulo Freire called the cultivation of a ‘critical consciousness’ in each student in how they will now perceive their cultural and historical reality. http://www.thinkingtogether.org/rcream/archive/110/CulturalAction.pdf That would be true and creating Guilt in the Fortunate Students is as crucial for transformative change as creating Anger in Latinos and Blacks and Gay Students and anyone else who can be made to believe the world as it currently exists must now be redesigned for their benefit. Vengeance will be a plus too.

Anyone paying attention might have been able to make that accurate connection though. What’s the fun in that? No, being a research maniac entitles us to more vital info than that on what’s coming. The links we have found to the Study Circles made me want to look at what are called Folk Schools in Scandinavia. Could those also be related to this new suburban vision for high school? UNESCO defines the current vision of such a school as a place “whose point of departure is today’s living conditions and the problems we face” and “which do their best to open up young people’s eyes by confronting them with more genuine experiences and broader philosophies of life.” Now I happen to know that high school is using the term ‘authentic’ instead of ‘genuine,’ but yes, we do have complete alignment.

I am going to bring this vision forward to award-winning Finland and what is now called the Human Dignity Paradigm suitable for a “Diversity-Positive Milieu.” That vision is said to enshrine what is called for by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. First though let’s go back to the year, 1948, when the UN adopted the Declaration to see why UNESCO wanted to push “The Danish Folk High School as an Instrument of Attitude Change.” It’s rather hard to escape the basic fundamental entry point needed for wholesale social change with a lead-off heading called “How to Create the Right Attitude of Mind in the Young.” Now in the No **** Sherlock Hall of Fame for all time great understatements in a bureaucratic report would be:

“the quickest and easiest way to create unity is to invoke terror.”

Now those readers who are Climate Skeptics may have a good idea where such a terror gambit may be lurking in the 21st century, but in general the report wants to create an ‘ethical standard’ that will force everyone to voluntarily cooperate by committing to “a higher consideration than themselves.” Of course some of us immediately see that for what it is-the Public Sector and Friends Full Employment Act until Time for a Taxpayer Funded Pension, but let’s pretend anyway so we can accurately recognize what is really intended. The word ‘folk’ concerns a whole people and the values they are all to share. Remember new humanistic values are the absolute inner core of all these global reform efforts by people who really do seem to believe Marx might have worked if the implementers had simply had enough supercomputers, data, and the psychological insights of the behavioral sciences.

A folk high school is designed to give each student a “comprehensive view of the world.” It stresses that “true life can only be possessed in common with one’s fellow man, and that some of the richest values a people possesses can be accepted and shared by all, rich and poor, high and low.” It is a place to build an “enlightened view of human and civil conditions” and a “blithe feeling of natural fellowship.” The latter is what we today might call a Positive School Climate. The folk school would be training its students in co-operation. Its value as a vision in today’s suburbs anywhere in the world is the fact that the typical Upper Middle Class student with educated parents who have made themselves available during those early years pretty much arrive at First Grade at close to the level of essential academic skills that are viewed as a long-term ceiling. To get to Justice and Equality for All obviously.

The folk school model then, and a widespread failure to comprehend the radical shift that has taken place, is an essential part of what is going on globally in education under the mischievous labels of ‘reform’ and ‘remaining internationally competitive.’ Hiding under those banners is an actual determination by public officials to force “a broad outlook and understanding” among all students of a given generation “so that co-operation” in all areas can succeed. This of course requires a “will to solidarity” in each student, which is why that affirmative Student Code of Conduct, Positive School Climate mandates, and requiring Principals to create Communities of Learners to be judged as Effective and thus entitled to promotion, are so crucial.

None of this is coincidental. It all fits like a Bespoke Glove because it has been custom designed to fit together to force the desired effects at the level of the school, classroom, and each student’s mind and personality this time. When that 1948 report sneers at ‘examination schools’ and their failure to create the “mentality required to rebuild the world through all-embracing co-operation,” just substitute high-achieving suburban schools with a traditional content transmission focus. Then update to the 21st century and its tendency to stress social and emotional learning because facts can simply be looked up.

The 1948 version with the same intention of cultivating a mindset suitable for fundamental change was to ask “what is needed by modern society?” The answer then by UNESCO was it’s “not what a man knows, but what he both can and will do in co-operation with others.” Furthermore, that “is a capacity that needs training. Teaching and school work must be so directed that the pupil both sees the value and feels the pleasure of performing a task in common.”

That same requirement now goes by the name Collaboration and is specifically listed as one of the 4Cs required for 21st Century Learning. We’ve gone long again. Next time we are off to Finland to get lots more details on what is envisioned.

A large part of what made America exceptional and historically prosperous officially died yesterday. It’s probably why there has been so little mention of a huge new source of funds to states and localities approved in a landslide yesterday by the US House. So we are taking a side trip but still related detour from the last post to discuss what has been done to us by our political class. Booth parties. Do not call them public servants. Many obviously cannot be bothered to read what they force on us in every state and every locality now in the US. Straight out of the radical Left Handbook that we saw at this conference. http://www.whitehouse.gov/files/documents/ostp/opengov/sond2%20final%20report.pdf

“The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which would update jobs training programs in the U.S., passed the House by a vote of 415-6 Wednesday afternoon and now heads to President Barack Obama’s desk. Obama applauded Congress for passing the bill last night and said he looks forward to signing it into law. ‘This bipartisan compromise will help workers, including workers with disabilities, access employment, education, job-driven training, and support services,’ Obama said. Labor Secretary Tom Perez called the bill “good for workers, employers and the economy as a whole.” Lobbyists and business groups were also thrilled.

Hardly any coverage of the statute. I probably would not have noticed it or read its 812 pages either if members of the radical groups that took out the New York Times ad commemorating the 60th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education and lamenting the lack of fairness and human rights for every person in the US http://civilrightsdocs.info/pdf/NYT-CCSS.pdf had not been practically doing a lap dance at the prospect of WIOA passing. Remember how often equity comes up these days supposedly as a new legal requirement of what education must accomplish? I have warned repeatedly that the actual definitions of College and Career Readiness are horrifically low and to be binding on all students. http://www.isakson.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/a4766452-3945-44d4-bb34-f8a6670bf166/WIOA%20Final-bill%20KIN14299.pdf is the final bill.

On page 514 we find the official Congressionally approved definition of what it will now mean to be prepared for the workplace, which is also now the official, Congressionally approved, function of all K-12 institutions as well as community colleges. Remember that suburbs or small towns that wish to exceed this standard for all may be accused by the Civil Rights Divisions of Justice and Education of being discriminatory. In many ways this also nullifies the various discussions around the country over the Common Core or other academic standards. Students now are to have a combination of:

Yeahaw! That’s not just the floor. It’s the ceiling as well with political appointees from Big Business, Governments, Unions, and community organizing entities determined to bring about wholesale social change organized into required Local Workforce Development Boards (Sec 107) to make it so. Nobody in any of the permitted groups granted access to these or the required State Workforce Development Boards (p 34) has any interest in Axemaker Minds likely to blow the whistle on cronyism or create a genuine disruptive commercial innovation.

Instead we now get Congressionally approved and to be required Career Pathways (p 10) developed by the Boards and Industry or Sector Partnerships (p 22) so that what students can do “aligns with the skills of industries in the economy of the State or regional economy involved.” The Middle Ages called the decision that others get to decide what each of us may become feudalism. The 30s and 40s called it Fascism and the 21st century calls it State Capitalism. It is now here in the USA.

No wonder neither side is trumpeting this monstrosity. Thinking about images from what appears to be a planned invasion of the US southern border that simply could not happen without a great deal of official sanctioning, I want to go through some of the considerable ways WIOA gives English Language Learners lots of funding and a priority place at the table of those boards and future employment opportunities. We may not be offering political amnesty yet, but my reading is we certainly have offered economic citizenship without regard to legal status. Now of all things. https://www.raceforward.org/practice/tools/compact-racial-justice-agenda-fairness-and-unity is an example of the kind of community organizing and democracy revolutionizing that is now intended in the name of race and ethnicity.

To give all of us a better idea of what democracy and equity and fairness and progressive change now mean, I am going to use a 2011 lecture Princeton prof (and Obama colleague and citizenship education advocate) Danielle Allen gave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrW6HNi9-QU The New York Times featured her vision of a radically transformed Declaration of Independence in a story last week on July 3. In my mind that makes her vision an officially sanctioned one by those with fundamental transformation on their mind.

She views it as the job of governmental institutions to secure and enable factual equality. By this she means five facets that governments must now see to. First, everyone is to have Equal Agency and Political Equality under a Principle of Non-Domination. Next is a Principle of Equal Opportunity that individuals must have the capacity to pursue their own happiness and that governments and politics will now be used to bring about the material resources needed. Start listening at about the 17:00 mark if you do not believe me.

Next is a Principle that Allen calls Epistemic Potluck. Believe it or not this relates to the affirmative use of the Student Code of Conduct we met in the last post. It also relates to what is called ‘problem-based learning’ in the new vision of high school that goes with this equity and democracy vision. Told you this was a related detour. The idea is that ‘knowledge’ is no longer about experts or specialists or a textbook, but rather the product of democratic conversations among participants magically deemed to be equal no matter how ignorant or emotionally aggrieved anyone is. These conversations will produce a consensus or shared understanding that will be pertinent to solving problems. We have also encountered this same deliberative democracy idea as the Rockefeller Process of Communication For Social Change.

Fourth is the Principle of Reciprocity. Those who have more have an obligation to those who have less so they can supposedly be truly free. Freedom is no longer to be treated as something that comes before the primacy of equality. Finally there is a Principle of Co-ownership of Equality. Allen describes this as a “communitarian commitment to egalitarian sharing of difficulty and prosperity grounds the social bond that sustains a free polity.” Marx was more succinct when he described the same principle as “from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.” Allen literally wants a communitarian commitment “to social decision-making” and governments empowered to make her vision and what a majority now decides to be necessary for happiness so.

We went back to look at Allen’s Vengeance Will Be Ours Finally Vision because the WIOA not only integrates Adult Education and Literacy for those with deficient skills but mostly for every English Language Learner on American soil. On page 546 WIOA calls for this to also be ‘integrated’ with civics education. That integrated model for those who are supposedly dispossessed comes straight from Marxist radical Paulo Freire even though the statute forgot to mention that. Since you may not be familiar with his work or view of education, here’s an objective source on where this all leads. http://tx.cpusa.org/school/classics/freire.htm Remember community organizers intent on race-based transformational activity are eligible to provide and be paid for WIOA adult literacy, workforce, and civics ed training.

I wish I could say something pithy about WIOA or how it will not be as bad as it looks. If you get one of the federally funded jobs as a trainer at living wages or become a Director or staff member of one of these new Local Workplace Development Boards, you win. The Chamber of Commerce wins. English Language Learners clearly win as they are constantly carved out as Individuals with barriers to employment. The rest of us not so much.

Unconstitutional earthquakes no one would willingly submit to can be hard to prove. Words like governance or mandatory collective decision-making or public goods get thrown about where the implication of a seismic shift is there, but that is rarely good enough to lay out convincingly on a blog that we are at great, demonstrable risk. If all of the actual Common Core implementation, and the digital learning essential component that runs in tandem with it, are actually designed to “give birth to the new systems and structures through which ordinary people are taking responsibility for their own and their community’s futures,” we have every right to have that included in the upfront public explanation of what is really going on. Especially in a world where Human Rights are now quietly touted as involving Economic Justice based on Racial Equity Outcomes.

That makes who has authority to seize, plan, and redirect people and property of vital importance going forward. As we discussed in the last post, crucial to these shifts is a new theory being pushed by the White House and charitable foundations called Deliberative Democracy. Like Sherlock Holmes fixating on a dog that did not bark, the lawyer and historian in me could just smell the fundamental shift in quotes like this one from the 2005 Deliberate Democracy Handbook (my bolding):

“By stipulating fair procedures of public reasoning that are, in principle, open to everyone, the outcomes of a deliberative procedure will be seen as legitimate because they are the result of a process that is inclusive, voluntary, reasoned, and equal…Deliberative democracy takes seriously the idea that the exercise of collective political authority must be capable of being justified to all those who will be bound by it. To fail to accept this idea is to fail to take the freedom and equality of persons equally.”

Do tell. So like Fulton County’s Conversion School District Charter, the idea is to use contractual language or laws or regulations to invisibly and nonconsensually bind anyone who might complain or resist once they become aware of this seismic shift in where sovereignty over the citizen and student lies in the 21st century. This turns out to be a global pursuit, but the US has a federal Constitution intended to prevent just this sort of public sector power grab. That would explain the desire to bring this in invisibly via education and regional governance compacts and mission statements and vision reports about metro areas.

In case anyone believes that I have an overactive imagination or am reading intentions into perfectly innocent and well-intentioned statements cooperation, here are three links to get your attention that this is a real problem that we were never to recognize in time. The first is The Deliberate Democracy in the Classroom Toolkit created to be compliant with the Common Core classroom and a new vision for what citizenship involves in 21st century America, including new kinds of dispositions. http://cdd.stanford.edu/toolkit/cdd-complete-toolkit.pdf The Toolkit has an interesting view of the relevant facts and obligations and once again PBS has prepared a curriculum called By the People, much as it did for that related transformational curriculum for the Common Core involving Facing History and Ourselves we covered in our recent Human Rights Trilogy.

Now just think about how handy that Toolkit and mandates about a Discourse Classroom involving considering respectfully the perspectives of all others as equally valid and schools Fostering Communities of Learners who come to agreement on a shared understanding will be to this goal:

“[learning democracy] centers share a common goal of lifting the voices and mobilizing the creative energies of diverse community members to improve the quality of life across all sectors and in all its dimensions.”

To those of you who have read the book John Dewey’s concept of ‘participatory democracy’ as the means to force economic justice is indeed alive and well and so is his favorite tool of forcing the seismic shift nonconsensually through the schools. The second point also aligns with the book’s disclosures and what the 1966 Yearbook described as intended for metro regions and urban areas and then what Turchenko described in 1976 in that Soviet report that was so quickly translated into English. Bruce Katz, who we first met here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/protected-producers-vs-paying-consumerstaxpayerswho-will-prevail-on-education-and-the-economy/ wrote a 2013 book called The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy.

The book was published under the “auspices of the Brookings-Rockefeller Project on State and Metropolitan Innovation.” That matters because the Rockefeller charities are clearly pushing the Deliberative Democracy concept hard according to searches I did over the weekend. That’s actually what turned up the Toolkit since By the People was created with funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as it repeatedly states. Someone is pleased with their efforts and is insistent on saying so.

I am going to resist the temptation to explain to Bruce Katz that economies cannot be built based on federal grants to create manufacturing institutes around clean energy or voters in LA and Denver voting massive sales tax increases around transit projects. Those are transfers involving bureaucrats spending OPM-Other People’s Money. Zero sum is the best case scenario.

Economic illiteracy, like the results of mind arson to get citizens compliant with Deliberate Democracy, matters though to the consequences of public spending. It is very easy to get lots of debt and unmeetable expectations for the future in the public sector-led reimaginings of the way the world should work going forward. That’s why it is so dangerous for Katz to be calling for “another historic shift in federalism.” He wants the “dual sovereigns” of the states and the federal government to be forced to share power with “their subjects, cities and metropolitan areas.”

Sometimes only a $100 word will do. That Usurpation by Fiat of sovereignty away from the individual in the US system, and then insisting sovereignty that is not supposed to exist in fact now be shared with nebulous regional authorities coordinating around Vision Statements, is absolutely Stealth Authoritarianism. It is the politically connected coercing everyone else to go along. How’s this for an open declaration of radical reshaping? This economic vision will amount to waste, but the hoped-for shift to governance of the individual is intended to survive apparently.

“We are trying to advance a theory of federalism that asks how federal and state sovereigns, and other partners and networks in governance, should interact to coproduce the economy. The metropolitan revolution is, at its core, an economic revolution…”

I’ll say. The next page says that “private and public sectors will coproduce the public good.” That’s highly doubtful, but it sure makes a good rationale for an unconstitutional usurpation of authority over people and property. I guess we can now think of what we know, own, or can do as merely in our temporary custody. Subject to seizure by the public sector and its cronies in an economic power grab that’s not that different from the serf forced to work land because it benefits the noble landholder.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_fy2009/m09-12.pdf is the actual memo. Hard to believe that the Administration that has supposedly lost incriminating IRS e-mails after they were subpoenaed actually meant to become Transparent, but that National Center for Dialogue & Deliberation makes it quite clear that this vision of public participation and collaboration is very crucial to that openly declared intention of fundamental transformation.

The better to bind us by and invisibly shift sovereignty going forward apparently. This is a good breaking point before I launch into explaining how the mindset perfectly suited for Deliberative Democracy per that Handbook is also the precise Mindset and malleable Worldview that the Common Core and digital learning state that they want to create.

Plus I do not think it’s coincidental that the name of the new Aspen Center report on digital learning and the new kind of mindset needed–“Learner at the Center of a Networked World” uses one of Bruce Katz’s favorite expressions for his desired metro-led economy of the 21st century–the ‘networked world’.

We are so far beyond having to infer any more from a Dog that Did Not Bark in our investigations of what is really going on in education.

And what is intended for most of us. Stealth Usurpation. What a phrase.

Education is the entry way, but it is by no means the ultimate goal. Those of us who want to believe that all would be well if only all decisions were made locally instead of at state, federal, or international levels should be aware that the Local was preselected back in the mid-80s as the place where “equity, implementation of human rights, promotion of democracy, and environmental protection” could best be invisibly put into place, especially in the capitalistic West like Canada, the UK, Australia, and the US. It was at the local level that the “world must evolve structures of governance (not necessarily government) that offer improved prospects of achieving sustainability…and decency.” The global belief that the local is the place to impose authoritarianism while pretending it is participatory democracy can also be seen here http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_barber_why_mayors_should_rule_the_world as long time activist Benjamin Barber wants binding power now centered in the cities.

The following discussion needs to be added to what we already know from the book on unappreciated events that took place in the 80s getting ready for a pivot away from communism and the Cold War that impacted education so much in the 90s and now. The World Orders Models Project we have already disturbingly met http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/reorienting-world-order-values-via-the-intervention-of-activist-education-and-progressive-politics/ began a Global Civilization Project in the 80s after a visit in the fall of 1986 from a special assistant to Mikhail Gorbachev. This Georgi Shakhnarov “discerning the changes which were about to take place [prescient, huh?] in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and possessing an impressive familiarity with WOMP materials, he felt that recent events were vindicating many of the WOMP policy objectives while obligating many in the global community to revisit the security doctrines that had authorized Cold War hostilities.”

Sure enough WOMP had a meeting in Moscow in 1987 that we were not invited to (although I did manage to locate the resulting book) that began the new vision we are still dealing with now, whether we recognize the sources or not. The post-Cold War world, much like the Great Transition, Subjective Well-Being, and post-2015 hype from the OECD and UN entities now, wanted “alternative policies that promote the ‘world order values’ of peace, economic well-being, social justice, ecological balance, and positive human identity.” From those goals came a radically transformed vision of education where:

“To realise the potential of the twenty-first century we will need to put aside the obsessions of the 20th century, especially the fixation on what we may have, and return our attention to the perennial question of what we may be. That process can begin now, in schools. This book has been informed by the view that the outer world is an expression of the inner one. The biggest step forward would be re-establishing a map of culture which includes more than the material and the instrumental. We can then use the new map, the new world-view, both to frame and define futures which breach the bounds of instrumental rationality and see human life as a self-aware part of the whole.”

That was the conclusion of a book Education for the Twenty-First Century published simultaneously in 1993 in the UK, Canada, and the US. That’s a lot of kick starting via the schools of a new vision of values to guide perceptions of reality going forward. The reason the core, then and now, of transformative changes in human behavior has to be values is because human values guide preferences. If you want social action for change, education and other social institutions where people gather, like religions or mass media programming, have to constantly be pushing the envelope on values and ethical issues and reimagining morality. And you wondered why values clarification suddenly dropped into the schools in the 90s or why a Kairos Center is being launched now.

Another one of those assumptions that was invisibly altered in the 80s and early 90s to commence the social and economic justice assault on the West was to push Socio-Economics as envisioned by the very same Professor Amitai Etzioni regarded as the Communitarianism Guru. We first encountered his work being cited to justify Positive School Climates and Positive Behavior interventions for all students. Then he came up again when we discovered the communitarian focus for what Career Ready Standards actually meant. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/does-common-core-target-hearts-and-minds-to-sway-future-voters/ Big surprise. His work on the ‘totality’ having primacy over the individual is to guide this new vision of economics. No wonder his work keeps making uninvited appearances.

Let’s take a look at the three characteristics an economic system must adopt to prepare for the kind of reorientation Etzioni, WOMP, Gorbachev, and too many others in well-compensated positions of leadership have decreed without our consent. Being shaped and then imposed invisibly via education: K-12 and college and now preschool and graduate programs. First, the individual is no longer to be independent and able to exercise their own free will. Instead, he or she must see themselves as interdependent. Part of interlocking systems. So when we have come across initiatives like Fostering Communities of Learners that are to be required and made a measure of whether a Principal is deemed Effective, that focus is priming students and teachers for the new way the economic and social systems of the future are to work.

The second rejection is the idea of maximizing value from a given choice. Instead, the emphasis shifts to ‘satisficing behavior’–good enough. No need to hold out for the ideal or a perfect fit. Students practice for this element of the reenvisioned social and economic systems via all those ‘rigorous’ assessments where there is no correct answer or the material has never been taught. It is what counts as operating at Higher Levels of Thinking under a Depth of Knowledge template for evaluating student work. Practicing a good enough strategy and being willing to act anyway. In satisficing behavior the focus is always on the future so that image of what could be can begin to reshape the current reality. Once again brought to you by people paid to push these pernicious ideas without having to live with the consequences. Yet anyway.

Number 3 is “consensus formation as the essential nature of interaction between individuals and institutions within the economic system.” This is the part where we all have an obligation not to point out to the community organizer or Area School Super that their vision is stuck at the level of a dull 12-year old mind or grounded in the anger of a thwarted teenager. All perspectives are equally valid, remember? This new behavioral characteristic gets modelled in the Common Core Discourse Classroom as students in the end do not get to retain their own opinions. They must practice learning to accept the consensus because in the Totality vision: “once a consensus is reached, all entities party to that consensus will embrace the final decision and quickly integrate that decision into their behavior.”

So just as many of us have feared all this pushing for consensus and mentions of governance really can accurately be viewed as authoritarianism imposed in the 21st century from below, rather than above. Locally, instead of globally even if it is the international wanna-be nomenklatura class that has always been behind the advocacy and architecture of these local and Totality visions of the future. I am going to continue to talk about this atrocious binding vision of Governance in the next post. I may have forgotten to mention that some of this post came from what is laid out in another WOMP book On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics.

Not if, and I mean this sincerely, I can still write and type and speak. There will be nothing humane in the end about this vision of the future. I want to end with a question. Have you noticed the sudden rise of signs guiding people to the physical location of the Chamber of Commerce in your community? Perhaps that is because, previously unbeknownst to us, “in the totality model, the means of resolving potential areas of conflict will be institutionalized within the economic system.” Suddenly then the Chamber’s headquarters may be as important for prosecuting interests as the courthouse or state capitol. At the table or on the menu has always been the reality in a politically planned and directed economy.

Have you noticed the ubiquity of touting ‘public-private partnerships’? Perhaps again it is a reflection of this hoped-for reality from the Totality vision:

“Thus, government does not operate in a contentious relationship with corporations (the public versus private dichotomization so prevalent in an individualistic economic system). As coequal institutions within the totality of the economic system, government and corporations recognize their interdependent relationship and realize the welfare of both institutions will be increased through cooperation rather than conflict.”

Did you notice in all this collusion at our expense no one is the least bit concerned with our welfare?

And to think all these truly lousy ideas are coming at us first and foremost through the schools. That of course would be precisely where the rollback needs to start as well.

To explain the whys of what I have so unambiguously now documented, I frequently go back in time to others who have played the role of prescient Cassandra urging the Trojans not to bring that strange gift of a wooden horse within the unbreachable walls. Today’s title comes from an essay Whittaker Chambers published in Cold Friday to convey his reaction to the mid to late 1950s Eastern European revolts against Communist oppression. Chambers always understood what was under attack from ideologies that target “the view we hold, unconsciously or not, of the world and its meaning and the meaning of our lives in it.” Since I have been asserting for a while that this is precisely what the Common Core and 21st Century Learning and cybernetics and Radical Ed Reform through the decades is actually targeting, let’s look at the full quote:

“In this age, hope is something that must be taken by the throat. This is to say, hope, to be durable and real, must begin with things exactly as they are, not as we suppose they were (even a few tranquillizing months ago), or as we wish they might be…The terms of hope are not to delude ourselves about this in order not to suffer in the shattering spins of fear that casts out hope. The deadly enemy of hope, its smiling murderer–is illusion…hope for you (as it has been for [the Eastern Europeans]) can truly begin only when complacency has been eaten off as by an acid bath, consuming the temptation to illusion.”

Never thought of myself or my book as an acid bath before, but the metaphor may well be apt. The way out is consistent with what I tell audiences when I speak. We need to keep our focus at this point on the actual implementation being required. It is provable and alarming. Right now intentionally created illusions impede our way out of this planned darkness of raw political power merging the religious and the secular, the public and the private, and society and the economy. In fact I found those Chambers’ quotes when I was mulling over that the Baha’i see no boundaries to their planned usurpation of authority over the minute details of our personal beliefs and conduct. With the raw power and all-pervasive tentacles of the UN and its affiliates behind them and UNESCO pushing their values as the integral core of global education reforms, we have a problem.

Confronting the actual intentions seems the only way out. Baha’i came out of Islam and clearly retains Islam’s doctrine of absolute deference to political authority. Likewise, Baha’i clearly contemplates what Totally Integrative Education now seeks as well, the “political and the sacred are indissolubly merged.” I am also seeing in the consensus mandates of the required Discourse Classroom or the Fostering Communities of Learners mandate what an American scholar of Islam, Franz Rosenthal, analyzed as consistent with the Muslim concept of hurriyya where an individual Muslim “was expected to consider subordination of his own freedom to the beliefs, morality and customs of the group as the proper course of behavior.” Moreover, Rosenthal noted “the individual was not expected to exercise any free choice as to how he wished to be governed…”

That attitude, that was common to Communism and is a tenet of both Islam and Baha’i, is radically opposed to the Western conception of the primacy of the individual and reason and the conception of freedom that came out of the Enlightenment. The individual has been the essence of traditional education, especially after the printing press and easy access to books made literacy widespread. Now we are back to a Whole Child education that explicitly targets personal values, attitudes, and beliefs with the federal government collecting data to keep track of how the personal transformation from the inside-out is going. We need a Douglas MacArthur moment from when he confronted State Shinto in Japan after World War II.

“Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with. Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese government, and as a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with.”

And it was. Today we have comparable attempts to indoctrinate students into collectivism as the only viable solution and transformation as the only acceptable action. The Baha’i books I cited in the previous post are full of those aims. Instead of reiterating those, I want to point out that these aims also come from a different direction that greatly influenced what would come to be known as LBJ’s Great Society. Now with the 50th anniversary eminent, we had best fully appreciate what was really sought in the first place. The planners are not done yet. Back in 1961 Robert Theobald published The Challenge of Abundance laying out his vision of how the West must change now that it had sufficient wealth and technology to meet all needs. He also described using education as the means to obtain the necessary new attitudes and values. This is from page 1:

“the attitudes necessary for the most rapid rate of growth are not those which encourage a meaningful life for the individual or a valid sense of community.”

That desire is still what we are dealing with today and it is what also drove the Swedes to dramatically alter their ed system in the 60s as we discussed in ways that mirror what is being sought today in other parts of the world. The idea, which I believe is erroneous but it IS the foundation for all these sought transformations via education, is that the “society of abundance could, at last, provide independent means” for everyone to reach their potential and thus for the first time in history have “true freedom.” It was Marx’s vision and it drives UNESCO today as Scientific Humanism. It also goes by Human Capability theory now and has an international conference coming up in Greece.

Education is always such a crucial component over the decades this has been sought because, as Theobald wrote: “such a society is possible only with the acceptance of limited desires. We too can have a society of abundance in the rich countries before the end of the twentieth century [yes, a bit off-schedule here in the US!!!. hence the hurry now]. But abundance is not a specific quantity of goods; it is a state of mind, a set of attitudes. Man can never produce all he could use, abundance depends on the acceptance of a reasonable standard of living.”

As of 2012, by the way, the Ford Foundation began calling that very same concept the Line of Plenty. Think about that passage every time you read about education creating a Growth Mindset instead of a Fixed Mindset. The Growth is in the new values and attitudes and beliefs about the role of the individual and the primacy now of the community and the perceived common good. It really is about getting the desired evolution from the inside-out that will allow the social, political, and economic transformations that have been sought for many years, behind our backs. We cannot afford to maintain the illusion of good faith disputes over content or how to best tech reading or math. The reality is that everyone from John Dewey to the Baha’i to the Club of Rome and Theobald are all determined to use education globally are;

“asking that man become unselfish. This is not necessarily impossible. ‘Selfishness’ stems, at least in part, from the fact that Western economic and social systems are set up to encourage individualism. If we reduce the necessity for economic conflict, it may be that we can develop a co-operative form of society.”

History reveals a very expensive mess coming out of these intentions Theobald laid out in 1960, but this remains the true aim in 2014. Common sense tells us that such aims will continue to push us towards a kleptocracy, but too many of the decision-makers now in education have a vested interest in continuing and expanding the organized theft from taxpayers. All the more reason to ramp up the mind arson to avoid detection for long enough to get another lucrative contract or lock-in that pension or promotion.

It does create a tremendous irony though that all these destructive policies and determined pursuit of changes to students’ values, attitudes, and beliefs involve the use of so much deceit to try to put in place “a new idea–we must demand that man should become responsible and willing to make decisions on the basis of the general interest of the community.”

Because that goal is always so beneficial to those who hold the strings of economic, social, and political power. Ever fearful of the magnificence the unencumbered individual mind is capable of.

Keeping hope alive indeed. Piercing through the deceit straight to the core of the actual intentions.

We shouldn’t be surprised I suppose. After all churches and religions, like schools and universities, are cultural institutions. They therefore also make very useful tools for accessing a person’s inner values, attitudes, and beliefs and changing them. At a 2007 UNESCO Workshop in Spain we were once again not invited to, the world’s religions were called on to “assist in the great transition to a viable future for all species.” http://www.arcworld.org/downloads/Barcelona%20Report.pdf Religions were called on “to renew and transform themselves” in italics just like that and to begin to “present alternative visions to counter the allure of endless consumption and endless economic growth, opening us up to something bigger than ourselves.” The workshop declared that the UN’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development that commenced in 2005 was “not just about the environment, it’s about social change and transforming economic and political structures.”

Education for sustainability “should aim towards ‘a change in mind and heart, changing who we are.” That intrusive goal of course gets much easier if schools globally are being pushed quietly to make new values, ethics, and moral development the invisible center of all instruction and assessment while religions are told they must now “come together” to push towards comparable personal and social transformations. The title quote comes from a Rabbi Arthur Waskow:

“the whole world is today in an earthquake: politics, economics, sexuality…all is off the ground. People look for something that isn’t quaking, desperately trying to find something stable, and so they don’t pay attention to the state of the Earth…Our calling today is like ‘learning to dance in an earthquake.’ This quaking will transform everything including religions: ‘We know what religious traditions were like three hundred years ago, but we don’t know how they will be after learning to dance in an earthquake.”

Now if an earthquake does come, I personally think survival will call on all my wits and knowledge about what has worked in the past and what consistently leads to tragedies. But then I am not a current or former politician or NGO bureaucrat. I am not even a professor. Just a lawyer seriously tracking all the things being pushed now in the name of Common Core in the US and why the required classroom implementation never looks like all the hype used to try to gain popular support for our own political and economic execution. If you are wondering how on earth today’s post veered into discussing religion when we were just overseas visiting with the Swedes from the 1960s, here’s my reply. It’s the same vision and really the same means as well.

In the kind of collaborative effort now going on between me and blog readers who have also read my book Credentialed to Destroy and thus really mastered the overall framework of the sought transformation, they find troubling documents and ask me to look at them. In this case it was UNESCO’s push of the acronym KSAVE as what the new assessments should be measuring globally as they looked for the students to change to reflect the desired Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes, Values, and Ethics. At the center of what the student was to become via education according to UNESCO were the Core Values. Next was an outer circle of what were called Social and Emotional Competencies that coincide perfectly with what David Conley listed in 2007 in a paper for the Gates Foundation as “College Ready Skills.” Renamed duplicitously in the US to try to hold off a full taxpayer rebellion from the reality of Social and Emotional Competencies and a commitment to Communitarianism as the new goals of K-12 under the Common Core.

It was Singapore’s new vision that was featured in the 2011 Keynote Address in China for the vision of Next Generation Schools, which is interesting since I happen to know Singapore is a listed partner in the global Curriculum Redesign Project. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/drawing-back-the-standards-curtain-to-discover-the-global-coordination-to-redesign-the-very-nature-of-curriculum/ The key question of course is what values and ethics are to be that guiding core. That’s where both UNESCO’s entire Values Curriculum and Peace Education push and the determination to shift all religions in an Eastern spirituality direction came tumbling out. Quickly. With very little effort. Clearly a core component of the transformation via education vision.

So that’s why once again we have to talk about religion. It’s where the values, attitudes, ethics, and vision of the transformations and the future are coming from. In his 1989 book The Inner Limits of Mankind Ervin Laszlo, who we first met acting with the Dalai Llama to urge education to create a Holos Consciousness, described the Baha’i Faith as the emerging global religion. Apparently it is what all the others are supposedly transitioning to. The Encyclopedia of Peace Education from 2008 created by Teachers College at Columbia has an article by Marie Gervais laying out the close working relationship from the beginning between the UN and representatives of the Baha’i Faith. Me? I had never really heard of the “world’s newest major religion” until references to it began pouring out on where the values and transformative vision of education were coming from.

Interesting for us in trying to figure out the implications of all this is the acknowledgment quoted by Gervais from the Chancellor of the University of Maryland in 2004 that “What the Baha’i Chair is all about, is the elevation of the common good. It seeks this higher ground by focusing not on what divides people, but rather on what unites them…we must ensure that throughout their higher education journey, our students travel with an open mind while exposed to the widest variety of ethical, spiritual and philosophical thought.” Which of course the students are to view in the desired way much like marionettes on the end of a puppeteer’s strings. i don’t think the Chancellor was just referring to religion majors.

In the 2007 Workshop I wrote about above, one of the participants was Arthur Dahl. He is listed as representing the International Economic Forum based in Switzerland. In the 2012 UNESCO and Earth Charter paper called “Exploring Synergies between Faith Values and Education for Sustainable Development” Dahl wrote the Baha’i Faith vision (pages 44-48). He stated that the “transition to a sustainable world is the fundamental aim and purpose of the Baha’i Faith” and that this transformation “will entail no less than an organic change in the structure of society itself.” I know you will be stunned to hear that the vision then goes on to basically replicate what we have taken to calling Uncle Karl’s vision of a small c, Marxist Humanism, human development society (that the Swedes pioneered) that meets everyone’s needs in the world as a matter of right just from being born. Just think of all the administrative jobs trying to fulfill that vision the UN and governments at all levels get to create.

And guess what institution is first and foremost the way in? Yes, ten points, but it is not education in the traditional sense anymore. Here’s Dahl again in as concise an explanation of what transformative education is all about as I have ever read.

“If education is to effect the profound changes in the minds of people and in the structures of society needed to shift towards sustainability, the nature of the educational processes will need to be rethought. As a starting point, the programme of education must be based on a clear vision of the kind of society we wish to live in, and the kind of individuals that will bring this about. It needs to help learners reflect on the purpose of life and help them step out of their cultural realities to develop alternative visions and approaches to the problems at hand, and to understand the manifold consequences of their behaviours and to adjust them accordingly.”

I could go on and point out how the various elements of the required transformations, including the ubiquitous service learning, replicate listed elements and practices attributed by one of these cited sources to the Baha’i Faith. I could point out how the required Communities of Learners and Positive School Climates sound just like Dahl describing people working “constructively to shaping communities that reflect principles of justice, equity and unity.”

I think this is enough for now though. We really are dealing with an official vision that seeks to regulate through the schools AND religious institutions what MUST be believed and valued and thought.

Conspiracy is certainly the wrong term for such a coordinated effort to make each of us servile to the exercise of political and economic power.

Now that these goals and the means have been once again pulled out of the shadows into the sunlight, what shall we do?

Some things really do need to be repudiated by individuals learning to act collectively against taxpayer funded planned predation.